


the sun rises anyway

by threesmallcrows



Category: Samurai Champloo
Genre: Character Study, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, M/M, Shipwrecks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 05:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10379655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesmallcrows/pseuds/threesmallcrows
Summary: "The sex is probably inevitable. All Mugen talks about are meat and women. Pork, duck fat, beef; farmgirl, schoolgirl, prostitute. Prostitutes are his favorite.'Tits or ass?' he demands. 'Pussy or mouth?'He answers his own questions, at length. Never waits for Jin to respond.Jin ignores him, doesn’t even pretend to listen. It’s all bluster, the posturing of a young colt. Mugen will make a move soon. He knows this before Mugen himself does."Jin and Mugen are shipwrecked.





	

()

 

He remembers being dragged through the sand. Grains scratching down his arms like little cat’s claws and the moon a chalk smear in the sky.

 

Above him, someone, singing.

 

Blackout. Awake. Vomiting brackish water until his ribs ache.

 

“Get it out, man.”

 

Mugen’s voice. The unique stink of his breath like a fingerprint. His hand is warm on Jin’s back for a second, and then closes into a fist, strikes him hard between the shoulderblades. Jolting more water out of him like slop from a pan.

 

He manages to crack an eye. In the blurred dark Mugen looks frightening. Carved out of rock or obsidian, some forgotten people’s god-statue. Something less than human.

 

“You’re all right,” he says. “We’re all right.”

 

()

 

The first days are full of work. The seeking of guttural answers to guttural questions. Where is the water? The food? Where safe to sleep?

 

The island is a litany of small pains. Jin’s skin splits and peels and splits again. The creases of his body hurt where the salt crusts and rubs: finger joints, elbows. His eyelids every time he blinks. He cuts his feet open on volcanic rock, his blood running a little at a time into the water as he squats hour after hour. Watches the fish flash by. Licks his salt-sore mouth, compulsively.

 

Already Jin feels himself losing civilization. His hair a knotted tangle splayed over his shoulders. He can’t see anything. His head hurts from squinting.

 

Mugen tans the same brown of the coconuts he shakes from the trees. He gathers abalone and fruit, lays at the edge of the shade. Licking the red meat of one and the other from the corners of his mouth.

 

Jin stumbles back to shore half-blind from the sun. He feels his eyes on him.

 

Mugen says nothing. Offers him nothing.

 

()

 

On the third day he approaches him with something glittering in his hand.

 

“Here,” he grunts.

 

A fragment of Jin’s eyeglass lens. It’s smaller than a child’s marble. Jin holds it up to his left eye, and Mugen’s face swims into alarming focus.

 

“Was all I could find.”

 

He lets it drop. What is there to look at, anyway?

 

“Thank you,” he says, anyway.

 

()

 

And on the tenth day Mugen flaps a hand at him.

 

“Get over here.”

 

“Hm?”

 

“I’ll show you,” Mugen grunts. “Where the abalone’re easiest to get. They’re big as hands here. Even a blind bastard like you can find ‘em.”

 

“Why?”

 

“’Cause I don’t have my swords and you don’t have yours. We’re not gonna fight. ‘sides the way you look so pathetic right now, I’d feel sorry to even try.”

 

Jin didn’t know he had it left in him to laugh. He does, anyway. “You’ve got a diplomatic way of wording your truces.”

 

“Fuck you. We ain’t got a _truce_. I’m killin’ your ass soon’s we get off this shithole island. But I’m tired of seein’ you drag yourself around like a sick dog. You’n be damned sure we’re not getting’ rescued tomorrow or the day after that, n’ in the meantime you’re gonna live.”

 

“Or you’ll kill me?”

 

Mugen’s lip flexes. “Maybe I will. ‘d be easy, the way you are.”

 

His attempts to spite Jin into action are transparent, the bald-faced manipulations of a child. Jin goes with him anyway. He feels like he owes it to him for trying.

 

The salt-choked abalone flesh reminds him of the ocean in his lungs. He gags. Still, afterwards, he feels a little better in spite of himself.

 

()

 

Mugen eyes the driftwood propped outside Jin’s lean-to like it’s a personal affront.

 

“What’re those?”

 

“I use it to keep track of the days.” He’s been marking the soft wood with his nail every morning. Each mark one stroke; five strokes to form a character: 五, the kanji for “five”.

 

“What’s the point,” Mugen grunts. Gives the wood a kick. “Pretty soon it’ll take you sunup to sundown to count ‘em and you won’t even have time to make a mark.”

 

“That’s why you do them in blocks of five-by-five. Then you multiply.”

 

A blank stare.

 

“Like, five-five, twenty-five?” tries Jin.

 

“So what happens when the numbers gets too high?”

 

“…Pardon?”

 

“ _You_ know.” He makes a gesture above his head, like he’s pointing at a very tall man. “Too high.”

 

“Numbers don’t—that’s not how they work. They don’t just— _run out_ after a while.”

 

A beat. There’s an almost audible quality to Mugen’s thinking. Jin imagines a badly oxidized wheel groaning into movement. Flakes of rust.

 

“Whatever,” he says eventually. He sounds a little sulky. Evidently Jin has ruined some fantasy he’s building, of himself as high lord of this pathetic scrap of rock, featuring Jin as his lowly secondary. Mugen’s kingdom does not, it seems, have room for mathematics.

 

Mugen catches a dozen fish that day, and sits nearer to Jin than necessary to roast them on the fire, just so Jin can see how plump they are, how sleek and bright their colors.

 

Jin smiles to himself and eats his abalone. With a stick he scrawls little nonsense figures in the sand and watches the irritation play across Mugen’s too-close face.

 

()

 

Mugen stomps past him again. Dragging a bedraggled woven fish net through the characters scrawled on the beach.

 

Jin says lightly, “Did you ever think to learn to read?”

 

“’d’you see anything the fuck to read out here?” He’s nearly shouting. Obviously aware that Jin has caught him out. “Huh?”

 

“We’ve only been _here_ for a week or two. What about when you get back to the mainland?”

 

“Didn’ ever held me back before.”

 

“Come now. You can’t say you were never curious what all those broadsides said about you?”

 

“Broad—what?”

 

“Broadsides. The posters the government puts out for the capture of criminals. They were on the walls of many a town we visited.”

 

Mugen swells with pride like sails in wind; a true-bred criminal indeed. “Fuck ‘em, I don’t need’ em to tell me what I did. ‘sides they might as well saved themselves the paper, ‘cause I killed about a thousand somethin’ people in my life and it’d take ten days just to write all them names out _once_.”

 

Jin studies his nails. “You’re right. They were having enough trouble as it was, I recall. They didn’t even manage to spell your name right, most of the time.”

 

“They _what_?” Mugen kicks the sand hard and it splatters across Jin’s knee. “Dumb fuckin’ bastards. The next sign-writer I see, I’m gonna kick a tooth outta him for every stroke he gets wrong, and them I’m gonna kill him. Fuckin’ hell.”

 

He stomps up the beach completely incensed, still shouting at no one. As for the fact that he himself doesn’t know how to write his name—that he seems to have forgotten entirely.

 

()

 

They dig pits in the sand for the embers, pits in the forest for water. They find the grasses that burn the slowest and yield the thickest smoke, and the upwind coves protected from the sea breeze and set the overnight signal fires there. They mark the tides and fumble out when the water is low, pulling shelled animals from the rocks. They weave crude fish nets from dried sea grasses.

 

“You’re so _bad_ at this,” complains Mugen, many times a day. “How can you be so _bad_ at this?”

 

“I can’t see.”

 

“More like you samurai are all delicate bastards with white hands. Never done an honest day’s work. ‘s why the country’s going to shit.”

 

“Funny of you to bring up honest work. I thought you’d like the way the country’s going. More room for criminals and thieves to operate.”

 

“Oh, fuck you.”

 

“Curse all you’d like. I know what those tattoos are.”

 

“ _Fuck_ you!”

 

They walk the island end-to-end, tip-to-toe. Bicker. They run out the things to do. No more questions, no more answers.

 

Taking turns setting the signal fire each evening.

 

Then the waiting sets in. Like frost before winter.

 

()

 

The sex is probably inevitable. All Mugen talks about are meat and women. Pork, duck fat, beef; farmgirl, schoolgirl, prostitute. Prostitutes are his favorite.

 

“Tits or ass?” he demands. “Pussy or mouth?”

 

He answers his own questions, at length. Never waits for Jin to respond.

 

Jin ignores him, doesn’t even pretend to listen. It’s all bluster, the posturing of a young colt. Mugen will make a move soon. He knows this before Mugen himself does.

 

He’s ready for it to happen, but it’s still—unpleasant. Mugen is the worst person Jin has ever been with. He does everything too fast, talks too much. He complains. “Hurry up,” he says.

 

He shoves Jin onto his knees and manhandles his face towards his crotch. The thick animal stench of him. “You know what to do,” he sneers.

 

Jin snaps and punches him in the ankles. Flurries of sand and the sweat-slippery tanned leather feel of him. A kick to the face. Gets him pinned down anyway.

 

Mugen is, perhaps, a little cleverer than Jin gave him credit for.

 

He writhes under him, pushes his hips into Jin’s. Friction; Mugen already hard. Jin tries closing a hand around his throat and Mugen purrs, a little.

 

He would probably enjoy this more if Jin had a knife to his throat.

 

“You have problems,” he says. Pants, really, and his cheek throbs. Mugen fought hard. What a waste of energy. Mugen’s adam’s apple bucks against Jin’s thumb like a wild horse as he laughs. “Hurry up,” he orders again.

 

Afterwards Mugen accuses, “You’ve done this before.”

 

Jin shrugs. “It isn’t so different. Between a woman and—”

 

“No, fuck you. You’ve done this before _with a guy_.”

 

“What makes you think that?”

 

Mugen sneers and shoves Jin off him.

 

“Fucking queer.”

 

It takes a great deal of strength for Jin not to point out that it take two hands to clap. He manages to say nothing. Mugen is the worst person he’s ever been with, but he’s still better than a hand.

 

He doesn’t know how long they’ll be here, after all. Jin is simply conserving resources.

 

()

 

They fuck three times over the next day.

 

Jin thinks he probably needn’t have been so thrifty.

 

()

 

One morning, after he’s swatted Mugen off for the _second_ time already, Jin goes exploring.

 

Other than the times Mugen has dragged him off to go search for one or the other thing, Jin has not wandered the island much. It’s not quite that he’s _content_ with the beach, or the signal-fire cove, the abalone rocks and the little patch of jungle where he sleeps. More resigned, perhaps. They provide everything he needs, so he doesn’t look farther.

 

Jin has always thought that he’d live a small life. When he was a child most of the boys confined at the dojo with him had ached and shook with impatience. Laying awake at night tumbling the sheets around, complaining about the cold, the exercises, the lack of food, the lack of women. Plotting bombastic escapes. Dreaming grand dreams.

 

Jin hadn’t felt any of this, and it had marked him like some physical disfigurement would have. The boys left him alone and he accepted it. He liked alone. He remained in the wooden rooms and manicured gardens of the dojo, and trained for hours longer than anyone, his mind blank and flat as a lake at dawn.

 

His master had disagreed. Mariya Enshirou was convinced Jin would become a great man.

 

But then he killed Mariya, and now there is no one left, probably, who thinks Jin is destined for anything at all.

 

This island reminds Jin of the dojo. He rises at dawn and meditates. He finds the straightest piece of driftwood he can and practices the forms. But then Mugen had loped by, his eyes flashing hunger, and in escaping him Jin found himself in the forest.

 

He wanders. The jungle is beautiful in an oppressive kind of way, thick with the heat of the sun but not its light, and with insects and water, pumped from the sweating pores of a million leaves. After an hour or two Jin could not shake the image that he was caught in the mossy throat-cave of some gigantic creature, exhaling in one long, slow death rattle. And for the first time since he fell off the ship, he feels panic building in his chest. He wants out. He runs, slipping through mud, flinching from vines touching his shoulders, his face.

 

He breaks onto the north side of the island. The beach here lies far below the level of the jungle, a thin strip of sand stretched like a rope around the black crags of obsidian tumbling into the sea. Jin picks his way down haphazardly, moving on all fours like a crab down the rock faces.

 

When he finally reaches the sand his feet and hands are cut up. He splashes water in his face, panting, and then squats in the shallow water for a while, grimacing as the salt massages the wounds.

 

He gets up to follow the sand back around the island to the south, and then he sees it. A small pile of wood shored up against the edges of a sea cave.

 

It’s the remains of a small rowboat, badly wrecked. He approaches cautiously. His hands brush his sides instinctively, grasping for hilts that aren’t there. “Hello?” His voice bounces once off the cave walls; goes flat. The space is small. It’s clear no one is there.

 

Still. There could be someone else on this island. He should get back quickly and tell Mugen. He glances around. There’s no sign of footprints. A scorched area on the floor tells of fire in the past, but the rocks are cold. The wood of the rowboat is mossed and rotting where it faces the sea.

 

Carefully, he peers inside its hull. There is a tin of some sort inside. The heavy rust flakes in scabs, revealing a hint of once-bright colors—perhaps a gift box of some sort? Jin pries the lid off easily, its hinge long rusted into dust.

 

Paper. He blinks and steps farther back into the cave, instinctively cautious of the wind’s prying fingers. Paper, and writing. Japanese. He lifts the first page very close to his face, squinting.

 

 _i do not think i have long left_ , he reads. _i find that i care not anymore. does any person make peace with death? if such a feat is possible i think i have._

_i thought to write a little words about my life then, to shew the man i was and my story. but the day is such a pleasant one—the first in a long while—the sky is bright and the clouds cheery like maidens dresses, that i think i shall put it off to later. now i will go down to the beach and lie in the water._

_tomorrow the sun will rise anyway,_

_xxxx- some year of our holy emperor go-mizunoo - x- nobusuke_

()

 

“What’re you doin’?”

 

“Reading.”

 

“Readin’ what? Give that—”

 

“—careful—”

 

Mugen holds the sheet at arm’s length, pinched almost delicately between his long index finger and thumb. It’s not quite upside-down, but he clearly has no idea which way he’s supposed to be looking at it.

 

“Th’ hell’d you find this?”

 

“On the north side of the island, in a sea cave. I do not think the one who wrote them is—here, anymore.”

 

“Oh. Huh,” Mugen grunts. He loses interest in the paper quickly, goes back to smoking whatever strange grass he’s found in the forest this time. When Jin reaches across him to retrieve it, Mugen closes his hand over his wrist and squeezes hard, stroking the torn stub of his thumbnail against Jin’s skin.

 

If Jin does nothing Mugen will have his way. He takes anything less than an active attempt at getting away a ‘yes’.

 

“C’mon,” Mugen urges, breath hissing in his ear, and he licks the shell of it. “Your man the writer ‘dve killed for a piece of tail before he kicked it.”

 

Would he? wonders Jin. Just to touch and be touched, would he have lived another day?

 

He’s waited too long: Mugen pushes against his mouth hot with smoke, and all thoughts are lost.

 

()

 

Jin wakes at dawn, as usual. He picks Mugen’s arm off his chest and goes to sit by the sea to meditate, but he can’t focus. Mugen’s snores grind out offbeat and on and off again with the sea’s low growl, like two hands clapping at slightly different rhythms. It’s impossibly irritating.

 

 _Forget a piece of tail_ , Jin thinks. _I’d kill just to get away from your damn snores._

He gets up then, and nudges the side of Mugen’s head with his foot, hard. Mugen jolts up swinging.

 

“Get th’ hell away from me,” he shouts, eyes wild, “you fuckin’—th’ fuck—” and Jin steps out of arm’s range and waits, because he knows by now how Mugen is when he wakes. He was like that too for a while, after he fled the dojo.

 

“Practice with me,” he says after he calms, and tosses him a piece of driftwood.

 

Surprisingly, Mugen complies after only minor bellyaching about the hour. The fight is sloppy and slow and tiring, both men stumbling and sinking in the sand. Jin nearly twists his ankle, and Mugen’s “sword” breaks when he hits Jin’s with it. Then they wrestle for a while, but it’s mainly play, batting at one another and throwing sand like two kittens.

 

When they’ve tired one another out—they both tire easily now; the diet on the island is a lean one indeed—they lie in the sand and look at the clouds.

 

“You were good last night,” says Mugen. “You should smoke with me more.”

 

“I don’t like the taste, and it’s not good for your health.”

 

“Who th’ fuck cares, man? Honestly.” Mugen’s hand comes towards Jin’s face and then veers away at the last second to rest in the sand near his head. “Look at you,” he rasps. “With that big beard. ’s been who-knows-how many months ‘n you’ve still got a tree up your ass.”

 

Jin hates the beard; it’s one of the few things he really misses, a good razor and a clean chin. He scratches at it, the tangled black mess. “I wish I could cut it.”

 

Mugen laughs oddly. “Yeah, man. Soon’s we make land.”

 

He gets up and wanders off soon after that, leaving Jin with the queer feeling that he said something wrong.

 

()

 

Jin forgets about that incident for a long while after.

 

They see a ship.

 

It is raining.

 

Mugen curses and blows and coaxes, but the fire won’t take. The embers dying in his hands, like little fireflies. The rain a thick shroud.

 

He screams at the sea.

 

Tears his shirt off and dashes for the shore.

 

“What are you doing?” Jin has to shout to be heard over the storm. Mugen, already waist-deep in the water, points somewhere out to sea.

 

“What does it look like, dumbass? I’m going to get out of here.”

 

“That ship is miles away.”

 

“I’ll swim miles.”

 

“In this weather? That’s a dead man’s wish. ”

 

“So stay,” he spits. “You’re the one’s happy here.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

He sneers. “Think I don’t know? You gave up. You ain’t care what happens. You ain’t cared in a long time. _Fuck_ that, man. Fuck stayin’ here. I’m out. You’n do whatever you want.”

 

Jin doesn’t know which part of that to respond to. “You’ll drown,” he says.

 

Raised middle fingers and a smile like a cut. “Die on your own.”

 

“You stupid fucking—!”

 

He grabs for him, but Mugen kicks out and is gone.

 

Jin gets neck-deep chasing after him before he comes back to himself. The sand beneath his feet vanishes, and suddenly he’s floating, walking on nothing. The water tearing at him from every direction. Pouring into his gasping mouth, eager to get inside the rest of him.

 

He can’t see Mugen. He can’t see anything.

 

He drags himself back to shore. Crouches on all fours in the sand. Lets his forehead kiss the sand.

 

()

 

A body washes up on shore.

 

When it moves, the relief is indescribable.

 

()

 

Jin is not gentle as he drags Mugen over to the fire. He relishes it. Speaks over Mugen’s loud complaints:

 

“You’re a fucking ass.”

 

“Least I try.”

 

“No, you’re just a fucking ass.”

 

Mugen turns his head slightly. Vomits water into the sand. He smiles a little.

 

“Maybe,” he concedes.

 

()

 

The next day the sun rises, anyway.

 

()

 

They sit in the cove as Mugen smokes.

 

“’d’you ever sleep with her?”

 

“Fuu? No.”

 

“Really?”

 

“As you were always saying, I never saw much appeal in her. It was a two-way street, as a matter of fact. She kissed me once when the both of you were very drunk, at the summer festival. She said I tasted like fish, and didn’t try it again.”

 

“Mm.” Mugen isn’t listening. Staring at the waves as he chews on his pinky nail. “Yeah. Fuu. She wasn’t hot at all. Flat-chested bitch.”

 

Jin says nothing. He knows the truth. He had suspected the two of them even before he had walked in on them. One day in the spring, back early and empty-handed from a supply run to town. Jin had expected to arrive home to grimaces and complaints.

 

Instead, there they were in the long grass of the field. Fuu’s kimono hitched over her hip. His face between her legs; her fingers in his hair. Her little, pale hand cresting the black swell of it as he rose and fell and rose, a small boat on a dark sea. And the sun moving over them like thread across cloth.

 

“Go slower,” she had said.

 

When Mugen raised his head Jin could see the obscene wet smear across his mouth, even from that distance.

 

He went into the house. They were out a long while.

 

The next big town they came to, Mugen vanished into the red-light district without a second word. Jin had sat up late with a fuming Fuu, drinking cheap rice wine that burned like a whip to the throat.

 

The moon rose high. Mugen didn’t return. Jin put down his cup, and said, “Be careful of Mugen. The women in those places are full of diseases.”

 

She flushed deep red. “We don’t—do that.”

 

“I see. My apologies.”

 

She hiccupped. Continued unprompted: “Since I—I don’t want to get pregnant. And it’s not like we have the money to get rid of it, if it happens. You know. A baby, before it’s born. So.”

 

 _So you find other ways,_ Jin thought. “That is wise of you. But diseases can be passed in many ways,” he said. “Take care.”

 

“Good night,” she mumbled, mortified and drunk. She slid the screen shut between them with too much force.

 

And now, Mugen is crawling on top of him. Impatient, jittery. Thumbing the head of Jin’s cock too hard through his salt-stiff _hakama_. It scrapes, hurts. Jin hisses through his teeth.

 

“Stop. _Stop_.”

 

Mugen doesn’t. Jin grabs his wrists, yanks them away and to the side. Mugen tumbles forward awkwardly, half-laying, half-sitting on him.

 

“Go slower.”

 

Mugen huffs. Makes a sound low in the back of his throat like a growl. When Jin lets go of him he squirms a hand between their jumbled legs and Jin smacks it away.

 

“Don’t—don’t touch.”

 

With a little effort Jin frees them both of their pants.

 

“Here—just—”

 

He grinds upwards into Mugen.

 

“—like this.”

 

They fall silent. Moving against the sound of the waves, obscene shadow bone play pale against the cove wall. Push and pull, pressing. Gaining and losing a rhythm. Making sweat.

 

Mugen’s face is backlit above him, barely visible, twisted in concentration. The negligible curve of his ass heavy on Jin’s thigh.

 

Jin spreads a hand experimentally over the dip of his back, pressing him lightly down.

 

“Fuck,” Mugen mutters. The syllable soft as smoke in his mouth.

 

At some point, maybe hours later, maybe days, Mugen slides off him and vanishes somewhere, probably to jack off. When Jin sits up the headrush hits him hard. He’s been lying down for too long.

 

Mugen doesn’t come back. Jin sits alone in the cove and looks out for a long time.

 

“Please,” he says.

 

He needs a ship to come. He needs to be taken away from this.

 

When he returns to the lean-tos, Mugen is asleep in Jin’s. Swaddled in large banana leaves and snoring a little; mouth slack, like a child’s.

 

()

 

Mugen rummages awake when Jin gets up. Woken by the movement of his back against his.

 

“Sorry,” Jin says. “It’s still early. Go back to sleep.”

 

He yawns hugely. “’s fine.” He stumbles after Jin as he digs out the embers from last night, lights the timber and roasts fish for the two of them.

 

“Hey,” he says. “You owe me.”

 

“For what?”

 

“Everythin’.” He holds his hand out and Jin gives him a skewered fish. When he tears into it he makes a small, pleased sound at the back of this throat and Jin smiles. Mugen keeps talking as he eats, specks of food disappearing into the sand: “Jerkoff. Let’s see… for draggin’ your blind ass everywhere and catchin’ food for us, and keepin’ watch for ships, and babysittin’ so’s you don’t go off a cliff somewhere— _oh,_ and for savin’ your sorry ass in the first place. How ‘bout that?”

 

“You have everything under control, it seems. I don’t think I have anything I could offer you.”

 

“Fuck off, jerkass. Teach me letters.” He picks a bone out of his teeth and looks at it for a while; the needle-thin whiteness of it. “Girls like guys‘re smarter than ‘em, right?”

 

“Depends on the woman. Some women like men who’re strong.”

 

“Nah, strong’s nothin’ special. Strong guys’re everyplace.”

 

“Not like you.”

 

He can feel Mugen staring at him. A nearly-visceral sensation, like your hand being held too close to a fire by a boy you’ve made a dare with. Jin refuses to back down. “I have been many places, and men—people as strong as you, they’re rare.”

 

Mugen makes a belligerent noise and slaps Jin in the back of the head.

 

“Hey—”

 

“You losin’ it or somethin’? Don’ go crazy on me now.”

 

Jin smiles. “I’ll teach you to read,” he says. “Then you’ll just be strong and stupid, as opposed to strong and borderline-disabled.”

 

Mugen snorts, flicks him off. But the insults are mainly declawed by this point. Some kind of formality, some last precaution. Like the way Mugen used to talk heatedly about women before they fucked.

 

Now he talks about them afterwards. He lies with Jin in the sand and asks, “What kind of women you like?”

 

“Thin ones. But not too thin.”

 

“Nah, man. I don’t mean like that.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“You ain’t stay with a girl ‘cause she skinny. Skinny can change. I mean what you stay with a girl for?” Mugen snorts, laughing—“Longer than it takes your purse to run out, I mean.”

 

“I don’t know. I have never stayed with a woman very long.”

 

“Homo.”

 

He ignores him. He’s thinking of Shino. “I think—I would like to be with someone who I respect, and who respects me. A relationship where we can improve one another. And someone that I have friendship for.“

 

“Funny, ‘s bout the opposite of me. I wanna get with a girl I can’t stand, and she can’t stand me neither. Where we’re kickin’ each others asses all th’ time.”

 

“That sounds… unhealthy.”

 

“Way I figure, how else you gonna know you’re not just friends? But when you hate each others guts but keep comin’ back anyhow—that’s when you know ‘s the real deal. ’s like, if y’ kick her out in the first three days and she don’t come back, well, she wasn’t never gonna come back ‘nytime after that neither.”

 

He shrugs. Squinting cagily at the stars. “I always kick a broad out after three days.”

 

“And how many of them have returned?”

 

“Hardly none.”

 

Jin wants to ask, _what happened to you? That you’re like this?_ Wants to gather him in his arms and press his head to his chest, stroke and soothe him.

 

But Mugen would never allow that. Even now he’s sitting up and edging away. Jin’s cum still drying in his palm but his shoulder on Jin’s side drawn a little higher and tighter than the other.

 

Jin remains laying. The weight of the night is heavy.

 

()

 

He teaches Mugen to read. He is not a good pupil, with his short attention span and his shorter temper. A year ago, Jin would’ve given up in hours. Now, he endures.

 

He’s taking this more seriously than he needs to. _What else do I have to occupy my hours with_ , he tells himself. But truth be told, he feels the need to atone for wrongs he didn’t commit. Like if he succeeds in this one thing he can reach back into the well of time and rescue Mugen from twenty letterless years.

 

ぬ. つ. す, he writes. “ _nu. tsu. su_.”

 

Who, really, is he trying to fool? When Mugen was five he watched fifteen men beheaded. When he was ten he stabbed another boy in the neck and waited as he spit his life out, the blood in his throat burbling like a tender spring. He told these things to Jin in passing, as easily as telling about a childhood crush.

 

Nothing he does will change anything. Nothing can save Mugen.

 

Yet still this stupid optimism grows in his chest. Unfettered—a weed reaching for the light.

 

“Try this line. It’s all _hiragana_ here.”

 

“The… the weather, today… fuck!” Jin snatches the journal page away from Mugen before he can throw it into the sea. “Somethin’ about the weather. ‘zat good enough for you?”

 

“No.”

 

“ _Fuck_ you.”

 

“Come on,” he goads. “I learned this when I was six years old. Surely you can manage.”

 

Mugen growls, makes to storm off. Jin grabs him by the wrist. Stroking the pad of his thumb against the tender skin over the vein, like Mugen used to do to him—and he quiets.

 

“Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

 

“’s fine, you bastard.”

 

“Try it from here. You got the first part correct.”

 

()

 

“I’ve heard that song before.”

 

Mugen stops humming. Then laughs, shortly. “Yeah, no shit. Good t’ know I haven’t been wasting my fuckin’ breath all this time.”

 

“That isn’t what I meant. It has words.”

 

Mugen shifts abruptly. Uneasy. Jin wants to laugh. In the span of a breath he’s shy as a maiden. Months and months, yet still a conversation without the excuse of a provocation puts disturbance in him like ripples on water.

 

It’s damn annoying. It’s the way he is. So Jin watches Mugen’s shadow flinch with the fire—back, away, back again. Keeps his eyes down. Lets him settle.

 

“The first days here, when I—”

 

“It was a death song,” Mugen sneers. “‘Cause I was just waitin’ for you to kick the bucket—”

 

“A dirge.”

 

“Whatever.”

 

“What is it about?”

 

“Some broke-ass beggar starvin’ to death. Brats runnin’ ‘round naked ‘cause she’s got no money. Shit like that.”

 

“Doesn’t seem your style. You learned it, how?”

 

“We all knew it. It’s like, kid’s rhymes and shit.” He shrugs. “Everybody just knows.”

 

The dojo wasn’t much for children’s rhymes. Still, Jin learned a few. All silly, or bawdy, lewd. None of them sounded at all like the song that Mugen hums like a haunt, compulsively, a sea fog around him that never clears.

 

The other man yawns ostentatiously. “Well. Good talk, man. I’m ready to pass out—”

 

“Would you sing it?”

 

He nearly adds _for me_ ; barely bites it back in time. That’s right. Mugen never does anything for anyone. He had almost forgot.

 

Across the fire Mugen’s eyes are nothing but two dancing chips of obsidian.

 

“Why?”

 

“I don’t know. I suppose—it’s been stuck in my head. Recently.”

 

He is silent for a long time. Eventually, he says, “Never heard of anyone stupid enough to try getting a song out of their head by listenin’ to it. But as his highness demands.”

 

“I appreciate it.”

 

Mugen fidgets with his sleeve for a while. “Close your eyes,” he snaps.

 

“Wh—”

 

“Just do it, alright? I’m fuckin’ tired as hell already and if you’re just gonna argue my ear off about every little thing I’m gonna go sleep on the east side and you can go get fucked.”

 

“I would rather not,” Jin murmurs. He closes his eyes. In the dark, Mugen’s laugh sounds closer.

 

“’sides, that way you can _appreciate_ my awesome voice better.”

 

“I’m starting to wish I hadn’t asked.”

 

“’s too fuckin’ late for that.” He clears his throat. “Fuck, man, I suck dick at this. You’re really an idiot.”

 

And then Mugen finally, finally shuts up, and sings.

 

His voice sounds lower and coarser than when he speaks. Rasping on the deepest notes like sand-shot wind. He is correct that his singing is unskilled.

 

Jin leans back in the sand.

 

Listening, he remembers a monk who had passed through the dojo when he was young. He had lectured the boys on the first truth of Buddhism: _birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering._ Jin was deaf to it. Too busy disdaining the man’s ancient face, melting in cascades of flesh. And after dinner he had scoffed at the forgotten crumbs sprinkled at the corners of the man’s mouth. _I don’t understand,_ he had thought. _I will never understand._

 

Jin thinks it’s too bad that the monk is dead, and the boy. He wishes he could bring them both back, to tell them, _I understand now. I understand._

 

From the way Mugen sings, he thinks that the Ryuku Islands must be crowded with dead children.

 

He tries to imagine it. The discarded ghosts of angry men and women littering the trees. Like so many dried cicada shells.

 

 

()

 

“明日…明日, 太—太陽が上昇する…”

 

“Did you understand it?”

 

“Is that it?”

 

“—yes. It’s the last page.”

 

Mugen stares at it for a long while. Then jerks to his feet abruptly. “Fuck this shit,” he says, and vanishes into the jungle.

 

Jin stays up late waiting for him. He does not come to Jin that night.

 

()

 

He wakes to a fire the size of the sky.

 

“Mugen!” he shouts. “Mugen—”

 

He’s on his knees in the blaze. Wavering like he’s in the middle of disappearing.

 

“’s okay. I just set the signal fire,” he croaks. “G’ back to sleep.”

 

Jin wets his sleeve and dashes out through the smoke, seizes Mugen and drags him up and away. When he lets go of him, his hand is smeared with black where it touched him.

 

“What were you thinking,” he spits, furious. “The whole island might burn.”

 

Mugen coughs and laughs and coughs. When Jin lets go of his arm, he slides to the ground.

 

“Wasn’t thinkin’ nothing,” he says.

 

()

 

The fire dies down, eventually. The island doesn’t burn, but a great swath of the grasses they used to color their signal fires pearly-white do.

 

“We’ll set them every other day,” says Jin.

 

Mugen nods but that just leaves him up on the ledge every other day and through the nights, too. He watches until his eyes are scraped red by the salt, until his skin tans black and thick as a turtle’s.

 

Mugen is drying up. Jin thinks of parched earth, cracked soil. The famine of their days.

 

There he is, far down the beach. Hunched over, he moves his arm over the sand. After he has gone off, Jin goes near and sees he has written his name, over and over and over again, trailing into the distance, the pawprints of a man. The echoes of a life.

 

He shouldn’t have taught him to read.

 

They say there are some things you cannot feel without the words to describe them. That words are like the wind that makes the kite dance. Without: just a square of paper, a string, senseless jumble, scrap. But the wind gives the kite purpose. Carries it high into the storm.

 

He may have made a mistake. Maybe the gravest mistake of all.

 

He licks his lips and tastes sweat on his mouth.

 

()

 

Jin dreams of their conversation:

 

_So who’s the first guy you killed?_

_Enshirou. My master. And you?_

_Don’t remember._

_Silence, then. The contemplation of sadnesses different and yet, in the end, all the same._

 

()

 

It begins to rain. The summer storms, returned; this is the second time already.

 

Jin shelters in his lean-to, and tries not to think. Thinks anyway: two years. Passed in some ways quickly and some slowly.

 

Slowly, these days. Mugen doesn’t come to him often anymore, and when he does he’s usually high, mouth reeking of the island grass. Jin cannot meditate anymore; cannot practice his forms. His mind unstill. Jittering with the worry of him.

 

“Hey.”

 

Mugen crawls in without ceremony, dragging the rain in after him. Jin’s face must make some sort of change in spite of himself; Mugen mutters, “’s’okay. Get dry soon.” He curls up on the leaves; butts his head against Jin’s leg. “’m hot.”

 

He is. “You’re soaked. You should take those off.” He tries not to sound too urgent. Lest Mugen sneer at him and his transparent concerns; take himself off into the rain and not come back.

 

Mugen doesn’t move. Jin does it himself. Pulling carefully, so as not to tear the hole-worn cloth further. Folding and laying the gray threads down like silk. They both have so little left. Jin pinches his mouth shut, swallows down the sigh to rattle in his lungs.

 

He touches his forehead.

 

“You’re sick.”

 

“Oh. Should go.”

 

“No. You don’t have to.”

 

“You’ll catch it too.”

 

 _I don’t care_ , Jin thinks, but he does. He doesn’t want to get ill, not out here. But he doesn’t want Mugen to leave either, and he cares more about that than the other.

 

He settles on, “It doesn’t matter.”

 

They are still. Mugen coughs a few times. The space is too small for the two of them; Mugen usually shelters on the east side of the island, in a half-collapsed tree bole. His ankle crosses the top of Jin’s foot.

 

“First thing I’m gonna do’n we get out of here, ’s find the biggest rack of fat pork I can and eat the whole damn thing,” he rasps.

 

“And you’ll buy it with what money?”

 

“Fuck payin’. I’ll rob, steal, and kill.”

 

“The usual, in other words.”

 

“Hah. You’re one to fuckin’ talk, _rōnin_. Them fancy swords, ain’t no more legal for you t’ have them than me.”

 

“It’s strange to hear that title. _Rōnin_. I barely remember having had a master at all.”

 

“You’re free.”

 

“It never felt like that. Not with half of Enshirou’s school chasing after me.”

 

“Ain’t no one gonna be chasin’ you now. Me neither. They’s figured we died by now, we been gone so long.”

 

“I suppose so.”

 

“You ain’t never thought of it?”

 

“No.”

 

“We should team up. After,” Mugen mumbles. “Least ‘til we find some damn swords.”

 

Mugen has never mentioned Jin in his plans for “after.” For a long time, Jin never thought of after at all.

 

Suppose they did escape this island. Suppose he never saw Mugen again. That would be—

 

“Maybe.”

 

“’s your ‘jection?”

 

He has none. He would like nothing better; even the mention of it raises his heartbeat like wind whipping foam from the waves. But he doesn’t want to talk about getting off this island. It has been two years and they have seen one ship. And hope is a madness that if let loose will destroy the two of them in weeks.

 

But despair is the same, and perhaps both have already been loose from the beginning anyway. Shifting from host to host, tugging at their wrists like two ropes as they balance together on a knife’s edge.

 

Jin has thought to take precautions. To take apart the lean-to and move it quietly somewhere deeper in the jungle, where Mugen does not know. Because of all surprises the biggest is that Mugen would break first. And Mugen has been dangerous before, and come to him, before.

 

But now he’s pliant at Jin’s knee. Talking about after, talking about together. Jin feels something in him coming loose, an awful tearing. “You should rest,” he says. He cannot shake the gentleness from his voice. The paternal or fraternal or love-feelings bubbling in his throat. “You can stay here. If you would like.”

 

At some point he falls asleep too. Wakes curled around him. Their bodies two edges of one ripple.

 

()

 

Mugen thrashes up before dawn.

 

“Need to go watch,” he insists. “Ships might come.”

 

He doesn’t look well. “Take a break,” Jin urges. “Just for today.”

 

“’n’t fuckin’ tell me what to do.”

 

“I’ll go with you, then.”

 

“Don’ have to,” mutters Mugen, but when they get up to the point he lasts barely until noon before dozing off, head heavy on Jin’s shoulder. When he’s firmly asleep Jin drapes the remnants of his _hakama_ over him and goes naked down to the rocks. Gathers abalone where Mugen told him to, catches fish the way he taught him to, _watchin’ where the fish gonna_ be, _not where they at, y’ get me?_

 

He owes this man his life. When they first came to the island he could not survive without him. Now, this.

 

He hates this fucking reversal. He hates this island so much.

 

The feeling breaks over him like a wave.

 

Jin stands in the water and cries, for a while.

 

()

 

Mugen does not get better. He gets sicker. He stays with Jin every night. Jin lies awake and breathes his diseased breath. Clogs his lungs with it. Waiting for the rattle to begin.

 

He hears Enshirou’s voice: _What have you learned today, Jin? What about you changed? How have you become better, and for what do you strive tomorrow?_

“Mugen,” he says.

 

He does not stir. Dead asleep in Jin’s lap.

 

()

 

When they are rescued, it happens so quickly Jin barely processes it at all.

 

()

 

It’s only days later that it all begins to soak in. Boards under his feet instead of sand. The creaking of rope and sail. The murmur of human voices.

 

He finds a mirror somewhere on board. He doesn’t recognize himself at all. He thinks that this should scare him.

 

He finds Fuu. Asks her where he can get a straight razor. She jumps up a little too quickly, smiles a little too brightly. Pressing the handle into his hand, saying “Take your time”—but then hovering loudly outside the closed door. Worried what he’ll do with it.

 

He knows she thinks he’s shell-shocked. All of them do.

 

He presses the razor against his throat.

 

If only they had managed to stay with her. Fuu should not have lasted long in the water, weighed down by her clothes, but she had somehow managed to slash her _obi_ open in the water and shed it, and that had let her stay afloat for the few hours it took for another boat to find her. A pirate ship which had been trailing theirs for weeks, as it turned out, waiting for them to venture into just that stretch of shallows that wrecked their ship to trap them and seize their goods. Instead they got nothing, all the gold long sunk in the sea. Just one half-drowned, hysterical girl who kept crying for the two men that had been with her.

 

After she had made it to land and earned enough, she had returned on a ship passing through the area, and then again, and again. All told nearly two-dozen criss-crossings of the same endless patch of sea. Looking, she said, for smoke, for anything.

 

And the days had rolled on, and he and Mugen, Mugen and he—

 

Mugen’s well again. He’s been off telling stories, each more ridiculous than the last. About the sea turtle he tamed and trained to come by name. The time he killed a shark the size of three horses with nothing but a broken oar. And the women, all the beautiful, disheveled women shipwrecked on their little island. Limping to shore disoriented, bosoms heaving.

 

“It’s a miracle you didn’t get poisoned neither,” exclaims one of the younger, more gullible seamen. “What with all them girls dyin’ from eatin’ mushrooms and whatnot.”

 

“Yeah, well. My stomach’s tougher ‘n about anythin’ out there.”

 

One of the old salts laughs. “Real likely,” he drawls, and Mugen flips him off languidly, like he could care less what he thinks.

 

It pisses Jin off. He hasn’t spoken to Jin since he woke, let alone come to him, touched him. Jin wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him over the edge until his eyes go wide. Fuck you. I know the truth. I saw the way you were in the end. You don’t get to pretend like it’s all right.

 

The blade trembles in his hand. He braces himself against the wall. Manages to nick himself only a handful of times.

When he opens the door Fuu looks nervously at the pile of black hair on the floor like it’s blood.

 

“Jin,” she says falteringly.

 

“Thank you for the razor,” he says, and pushes past her.

 

The days limp on. Soon he is told that the newcomers are expected to work their way to the next port. Mugen, with his monkey limbs and monkey grace, is sent up into the masts to haul sail and keep watch. Jin scours the decks, helps the cook, takes dictation for the captain in neat, perfect calligraphy.

 

They manage to avoid each other for far longer than Jin expects. They do not manage it forever.

 

()

 

He wakes.

 

The ship groans softly around him like a man in a nightmare. The air smells like night.

 

As he has for the past two weeks, he lies for a while, and reminds himself in a chant, _you are not on the island anymore, you are not on the island. You are free._

 

He goes outside. A glittering mass of stars sprawls above him in the sky. The same as on the island. If he only looks up, he can almost believe he’s back there. He doesn’t want to be—but he doesn’t quite want to be here, either. Isn’t, quite here.

 

He tilts his head farther back. High, high in the night burns the flame of an oil lamp, swaying in the crow’s nest at the top of the mainmast.

 

The faint shuffle of feet behind him. Mugen lands on the desk nearly soundlessly, rising from a crouch like a cat.

 

“So what the hell’s your problem, anyway?”

 

Jin says nothing.

 

“Hey, you prick.”

 

“It was almost two years,” he says. “I find I have little left to say.”

 

“Oh, is that how it is.”

 

“It is.”

 

“Are you getting’ off at the next port?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“Why, haven’t _thought it through_?”

 

“I suppose not, no. I haven’t thought about it.”

 

He laughs, then. The anger thick as pitch in his voice.

 

“Fuck two years. Two years of _shit_. I go and go in circles and I still ain’t understand a single fuckin’ thing about you, and at this point, I couldn’t care less to understand and I couldn’t care less wherever the fuck you get off this fuckin’ ship.” He hacks and spits on the deck between them. “You’n go fuck yourself.”

 

Jin watches him go like a man paralyzed.

 

 _I don’t understand you either_ , he tells himself. _Not a single thing_.

 

He wants so desperately to believe it.

 

“Mugen—”

 

They collide hard. Mugen’s elbow hammering Jin’s ribs, Jin’s nails clawing into his shoulder. "Get _off_ me, you shit bastard—” Mugen slams his knee dangerously close to Jin’s crotch and Jin shoves him forwards until he’s pinned against the ship’s railing, panting, pain a sick circle high on the inside of his thigh.

 

“No.”

 

“ _Fuck_ you.”

 

“We should—lets go, together,” he says, too quickly. “You and Fuu. And I.”

 

Mugen quiets. He’s shaking in his hands, Jin realizes. Staring resolutely past Jin. Jin watches him anyway. The wet relief blooming in his eyes.

 

“Thought you didn’t know where you was getting’ off.”

 

“It doesn’t matter what port it is.”

 

“Could you let _go_ , you fuckin’ ass.”

 

When Jin releases him he digs the pads of his fingers into his shoulder, wincing. “Jesus Christ on a skewer. Put fuckin’ holes in my bones.”

 

He lopes towards the ropes that lead up the mast. Begins to climb. It’s only when he’s thirty feet in the air that he cocks his head to the side and condescends to call over his shoulder, “I’ll consider it. _Asshole_.”

 

He hums as he climbs, the sound rising like smoke. A different song than always. Jin’s not sure yet if it’s happy, sad.

 

He supposes that there will be time to tell.

 

It’s just beginning.

 

()

 

_fin._

 

 


End file.
